Tools such as the ‘Remote Management System’ (RMS) and the ‘Analytic-based Maintenance Service’ (AMS), developed by Trebide, make it possible to execute tasks remotely to support the operation and maintenance of the equipment on board the train.

The recent opening of the railway sector to the incorporation of new digital technologies has enabled the development and implementation of tools directly focused on train operation and maintenance. Advances in digitisation and connectivity bring speed and cost reduction to these fundamental processes, as they allow many actions that until now required the physical movement of specialised technicians to be solved from a control centre or from the railway operators’ maintenance facilities.

This is a qualitative leap for rail operators, who often cover a wide geography and work with a large fleet that must be supplied with multimedia content, pre-recorded messages or urgent communications for passengers. In a similar situation are maintainers, who thanks to connectivity can change equipment configurations or customise equipment for specific customers directly from the ground. As a result, this maintenance task can now be carried out more quickly and effectively, and also allocate more human resources to tasks that require more streamlined and specialised intervention.

Trebide has more than 25 years of experience in the railway sector and an extensive portfolio of projects executed with national and international customers. This experience makes this company the ideal partner for tackling the challenge of digitisation in the fields of railway operation and maintenance. Furthermore, Trebide has developed a portfolio of its own digital tools that enable the execution of tasks digitally and remotely to manage the on-board systems that the company supplies to the trains. The two digital tools that currently make up this portfolio are the Remote Management System (RMS) and the Analytic-based Maintenance Service (AMS). Trebide works with railway manufacturers that supply trains internationally, so both tools are designed to be operational in multiple countries and are adapted to the characteristics and regulations of the territory in which they are going to operate.

RMS: remote equipment configuration and real time information

RMS, which has been developed by Trebideon the basis of digitalisation and connectivity technologies, has the main objective of remotely managing and configuring the multiple on-board systems that Trebide supplies to its customers, whether they are maintainers, operators or manufacturers. These solutions supplied include passenger information systems, on-board video surveillance, entertainment, management of the software of the equipment on the train and even specific systems required by its customers.

Thanks to the RMS, Trebide is able to collect information in real time on the status and operation of the equipment, based on variables and parameters such as the temperature of the controllers, the operating hours or the execution status of the different programmes inside the equipment. In certain projects, this tool collects a large number of variables in real time, used to generate a central data repository and on which Trebide carries out analytical work. These analytical models are also downloaded to the train’s equipment in order to enable the prediction of faults by means of their execution in real time.

This tool is therefore key to the work of maintainers and operators. For the former, the possibility of visualising on a screen a representation of the status of the on-board equipment of their entire fleet of trains is of great help. This functionality of the RMS allows them to deal with incidents very quickly, intuitively and remotely, sometimes even before the train operator has been alerted to their existence. For their part, operators benefit directly from another essential functionality of the RMS: the possibility of uploading content in real time, such as, for example, the specific routes that the train is running, content that is directly related to the on-board systems supplied by Trebide, such as passenger information or entertainment systems.

AMS: predictive analytics for optimising the maintenance service

The second of the digital tools that Trebide makes available to its customers is the AMS, a key tool for maintenance service management. This tool extracts two types of data from the equipment implemented by Trebide. On the one hand, the AMS collects historical data by storing the incidents that have occurred to date on each of the equipment and on each of the trains, which enables a descriptive analysis to be made of the incidents based on their typology and recurrence. On the other hand, the AMS uses the real-time data provided by the RMS to carry out modelling tasks with analytical algorithms to predict how many incidents will occur on a given piece of equipment and when they will occur.

This predictive functionality represents a very important qualitative leap for the maintenance service offered by Trebide, as the AMS provides all the necessary information for predicting demand and optimised management of the necessary resources: deciding in advance which resources are going to be assigned to work on each incident. This advantage results in efficient internal planning and, in turn, in cost savings and increased customer satisfaction. Both maintainers and manufacturers and operators in charge of maintenance work can take advantage of the benefits of AMS, especially of this predictive analytics that allows them to go a step beyond comprehensive maintenance and achieve intelligent maintenance.

Trebide makes this portfolio of digital tools available to all its customers through different marketing models, but always in accordance with the specific needs of each one of them. Tools such as RMS and AMS show that Trebide is an integrator with the capacity to develop technological assets of great added value for the railway sector, both from the point of view of operation and maintenance. After 50 years of professional experience and 25 of them dedicated to the railway sector, Trebide has the guarantees, tools and resources to continue to be an indispensable partner for national and international companies in the era of digitisation and connectivity.